The U.S. Department of Commerce is opening six new international markets for its Commercial Digital Attaché program, according to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker who spoke with TechCrunch today in San Francisco.
The attaché program, which began in March this year, establishes commercial officers in countries where U.S. businesses seek to export their digital goods and… Read More

Many in the industry believe the next frontier for VR is web-based experiences that can be visited and absorbed across platforms.
There are still quite a lot of unknowns when it comes to WebVR but Oculus is looking to start shedding some of the mystery through its own browser. Today, the company launched the Carmel Developer Preview, giving devs some early tools and APIs to begin building… Read More

Wait, what? Yes, you read correctly. “Data” and “minimization,” two words that have rarely been used in the same sentence, now represent one of the critical product design rules we must apply if we’re to build products that deliver value, meaning and engagement to the human beings we aim to serve. A little confused? Not to worry — let’s start with why. Read More

From Brexit to bionic arms, our lineup of speakers at Disrupt London 2016 gave us awesome insight into a variety of different topics. In case you missed it, the TechCrunch social team compiled the 15 most memorable quotes from the event. Read More

As the world was collectively watching results of the 2016 election , we got a barrage of emails from people congratulating our AI for predicting a Trump win. To be very clear, our AI did not call a Trump win, per se, but rather conditions that would support a Trump or a Hillary win. Read More

President Obama has ordered intelligence agencies to conduct a complete review of the hacks and leaks that led up to and may have influenced the presidential election, according to White House homeland security and counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco.
“The President has directed the Intelligence Community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election… Read More

The promises of the cloud era have been many, but when it comes to hardware, most people have preferred to keep their personal PCs on-hand or on-location.
Sixa is aiming to free the PC and move computing to the cloud with its low-latency virtual machines geared toward developers. The recent Y Combinator grad just closed a $3.5 million round of seed funding led by Tandem Capital.
More… Read More

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder visited the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, MI, which honors the automotive past, to sign a bill that aims to enable the automotive future. The law creates regulations for testing, using and selling autonomous vehicles in the state and clarifies how these vehicles will be used on public roads.
The law specifically allows vehicles that have no human… Read More

Early this morning Samsung announced plans to finally extinguish the on-going fire that is the Note 7 once and for all here in the States by way of a software update that won’t allow the troubled phone to charge at all. Apparently not everyone involved is onboard with the move.
Verizon (the parent company to TechCrunch’s parent company) quickly issued a follow up statement, citing… Read More

Jason Citron, who previously founded and sold the early mobile social gaming network OpenFeint, returned to gaming startups with the launch of Discord in May 2015. This voice and text chat app for gamers — a challenger to incumbents like Skype and Teamspeak — has since grown to 25 million registered users, who are sending 100 million messages per day across its platform. Read More

It a bit of news that will surely shift the value proposition of Mario’s long-awaited iPhone debut for legions of underground commuters, Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed this week that Super Mario Run will only work on a device with a constant internet connection.
The legendary game creator chalked up the decision to security concerns, fears that an offline mode would make the game unstable… Read More

Mobile VR is an Android game, but as more and more rumors flourish about the next iPhone, some companies are looking to get developers ready to bring iOS users into the world of VR.
Occipital announced today that it is launching a mixed reality platform built upon its depth-sensing technologies called Bridge. The headset is available for $399 and starts shipping in March; eager developers can… Read More

As the prolonged garbage fire that is 2016 draws to a close, Samsung seems to finally be putting the final nails in the coffin of the Note 7 saga. Admittedly, the last couple of months have mostly been a few isolated death rattles, but believe it or not there are still some devices in the wild, in spite of the company’s best efforts to get them all back.
New numbers posted today have… Read More

Workplace by Facebook has been in general release for just two months now, but it’s clear that Facebook has big plans for its enterprise social product. Just this week, at TechCrunch Disrupt in London, the company announced a new platform to integrate enterprise applications with Workplace, putting it in direct competition with Slack, the enterprise social darling of the moment. Read More

Jim Kim, who most recently co-founded the venture firm Formation 8, is launching a brand-new venture firm called Builders that looks to be raising a $200 million fund, judging by a recent SEC filing. His co-founder is Paul Lee, who left the Chicago venture firm Lightbank in 2014 and last year launched a startup studio called Roniin. Read More

Yahoo Answers has officially launched on mobile. As TechCrunch reported last month, Yahoo’s experimental app code-named Yahoo Hive had been rebranded as Yahoo Answers Now — a move that indicated Yahoo’s plans to bring its desktop Q&A site to the App Store. However, at the time, the app still required an invite in order to test it out — that restriction… Read More

On February 20, 1962, John Glenn had a problem.
Glenn, the first American in orbit, was inside his capsule, the Friendship 7. Mission Control wanted him to take over the capsule’s manual controls. During the effort the automatic systems failed, leaving him in full control of one of the most complex artifacts ever created by humankind. He was alone in space at the helm of a beast that… Read More

Facebook today announced it’s correcting a few more issues with its metrics in areas like audience estimation for ads, live video reaction counts and its Like and Share buttons. Though the fixes are referencing several of Facebook’s more high-profile products, the issues being addressed aren’t as significant as the ones Facebook identified earlier in 2016, when it discovered… Read More

As we roll toward the end of humanity and the moment of robot takeover, it’s important to start learning the songs and customs of our inhumane artificial overlords. Researchers at the University of Toronto, for example, showed an AI a picture of a Christmas tree and asked it to write a song about it. The result? A song that we will soon all be singing as we huddle in the dark while our… Read More